Teacher Inquiry, Reflection, and Data-Informed Instruction - Research and Resources

This toolkit from Hanover Research presents best practices for identifying, collecting, analyzing, communicating, and using district data equitably. Note that this is aimed more at the district level than the individual classroom level, but there are principles that can also apply to individual classroom instructions.

This is a toolkit for building data infrastructure that centers equity. Note that this is not just focused on education. However, the mindsets and tools may be helpful in a variety of contexts.

This research article describes how teachers use the data available to them, and whether or not they change their instructional delivery in response.

Learning to meet students’ needs challenges new teachers often focused on procedures, management, materials, and curriculum. To avoid this development pattern, student teachers (STs) need opportunities to concentrate especially on needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Teacher inquiry (TI) holds promise as one such opportunity.

In this article, the authors argue that developing personal and professional critical consciousness about racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity should be a major component of preservice teacher education. They discuss some maneuvers teacher education students use to avoid engaging with racial issues in education, and suggest some strategies for counteracting them. The resistance strategies include silence, diversion, guilt, and benevolent liberalism. Techniques to offset these and develop critical cultural consciousness and self-reflection include creating learning expectations of criticalness, modeling, providing opportunities to practice critical consciousness, and translating conceptual multicultural education into K-12 instructional possibilities. Woven throughout the specific suggestions is the general directive that critical consciousness learning experiences should take place within the context of guided practice, authentic examples, and realistic situations.